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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Does Inhofe's dishonesty know any bounds?

Following up on Sen. James Inhofe's pathetic attempt to recycle his bogus global warming denialist list from last year and pass it off - again - as a Senate minority report, Deltoid has written several more posts further demonstrating how lacking in intellectual standards Inhofe is.

Both times that I've written about this list I've mentioned that Inhofe employs the same poor reasoning and dishonesty that creationists use when they create similar lists about evolution. Tim Lambert points out that Inhofe's list is actually more dishonest than the anti-evolution list at the Discovery Institute (home of ID Creationism.) And 5 names appear on both lists.

Another post notes that there are 618 Working Group 1 authors of the IPCC report, but merely 3 of these names appear on Inhofe's list. Of the three, two were quote-mined and do not belong on the list.

Reporters seem to have wised up to Inhofe's game and the list has been mostly ignored in the media. Here in Australia, that means that all the AGW denialist columnists will write about it, and sure enough, here's Miranda Devine in today's paper

They include Japanese scientist Dr Kiminori Itoh, who was an expert reviewer for last year's United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, who declared global warming the "worst scientific scandal in [history]". Former NASA atmospheric scientist Dr Joanne Simpson is quoted: "Since I am no longer affiliated with any organisation nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly ... As a scientist I remain sceptical."

OK, let's look at those two. I wonder what Inhofe hid with that ellipsis? Here's a fuller quote from Simpson:

What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical.

And she goes on to talk about how NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission can provide more complete information by testing the predictions of climate models. Simpson is skeptical, but she's using the word with its original meaning, not the way that "global warming skeptics" use it.

It is true that Itoh was an IPCC reviewer - which he means he did not contribute to the science of the report - and Lambert points out that the changes he proposed were relatively minor given the grandiosity of his claims. Regardless, Itoh is not a climate scientist and has not published peer reviewed materal on the subject (although he has written a denialist book.)

It's also probably worth noting that the compiler of the list - Marc Morano - was previously employed by America's king of misinformation Rush Limbaugh.

Update: Lambert took a look at an HIV denial list and found five names that appear on both lists.